Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 4, 1925 — page 70: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

860 a position beside the door which gave egress from the front of the ranch—a door which was never used by the cattlemen—and fac- ing the room, did as much as call the meet- ing to order. ‘“‘Slade’s all in favor of speedin’ ac- tivities up,” he said. ‘‘ Me, too. But it ain’t eleven o’clock yet, an’ we don’t want to ride ’round till the roads are clear. We know that what we’re doin’ is right an’ fair, but we don’t want to make things hard for the sheriff to explain away. We got to do it secret enough to avoid talk.” He appraised his company as he spoke, and was pleased with it. There were ten men grouped about him, counting Gilley and the other two who were hirelings of the Bar Nothing ranch, henchmen to be trust- ed. The quality of the remaining seven filled Lederer with pride in the adroitness of his own strategy. For those seven men Were no small figures of the range; they were representative citizens to a man, and Lederer had wrought upon them to do this business for him in a spirit of high justice and righteous indignation. Slade, who sat in the window seat with his eyes dwelling unconsciously upon the spot where Farley had replaced that loose ‘board, was convinced of Cosgrove’s guilt, and having seen the dapper, pale young man as he appeared in the court room, was determined that the men of the range should avenge this assassination as practiced in the effete East. All these men knew what gunplay was and, while frequently regretting it, even resenting it, felt confident of the manliness involved in it. But they would never per- mit it to be said of Manford that a shot in the back could be indulged in there with impunity. So they sat there, in a silence becoming to the sacred cause they repres- ented; regretting the necessity of it, but conscious of the rights involved. ‘‘Shucks! We ought to string him up right in the middle of town. I don’t see any need of sneakin’ this thing off in the dark. He ought to be hung, an’ we're goin’ to hang him! Let’s go!” Thus spoke Webb, a sturdy ranchman who varied the mono- tony of the range by singing bass in the church choir. ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. ‘“ Cliff’s right,’’ Slade insisted. late and save talk.” “This Cosgrove,” pursued ‘“ain’t no man to waste talk over. like men we know. He hasn’t even got the guts of a greaser. He don’t belong where men live at all, but I’ll tell you where he does belong. “You'll find his kind down back of the stockyards in Kansas City. A tenderloin gunman, that’s what he is; the kind that sneaks down alleyways and shoots in the back. You know he was here in town the night that Mase Farley was shot thata- way— Why, he ain’t no man at all! ‘An’ there ain’t no reason for us to talk about hangin’ him, because to let his kind get away with them back alley meth- ods would be to lay open the whole range to them. Manford’s always been a place for a man to live in. We always had our own way of settlin’ differences, an’ they’ve been right abrupt sometimes an’ fatal. But we done it like men. ‘“ This Cosgrove comes in an’ does it like a coyote or a snake. The question is, are we goin’ to allow him to get away with it? Are we goin’ to open the range to the the scum of the city slums, or not?” ‘‘ An’ the answer is, ‘ We ain’t,’ ” snapped Webb. A murmur filled the room, supporting him; it reverberated in the confines of the thin walls, as a distant storm rumbles up the wind; menacing, deadly. Lederer broke in upon it, his loud, vouthful voice, cap- ping it, dominating it. ‘“ An’ we'll hang him like the hound he is!” he cried. ‘“‘ I got Thunderbolt outside, wno has thrown every buckaroo in three States. I got Thunderbolt all saddled an’ bridled. We'll put this skunk on Thunder- bolt with a rope ’round his neck, an’ we'll hitch the rope to a tree! That red devil will heave him so far he’ll be lucky if his head don’t come orf at the neck! That’s how we'll hang him!” Slade arose from his seat, very gravely. “ Yo’re shore talkin’ wild, Cliff,” he said. ‘That ain’t no way to hang a man. We got to do it dignified an’ straight. This ain’t no rodeo.” Lederer glared at him with the fury of “Do it Lederer, He ain’t Conn lDOOlK